Updated 10 February 2000

Votes cast for candidates and voting turnout in the second round in 2000

First woman president for Finland, Tarja Halonen the winner of the election

Tarja Halonen beat her opponent Esko Aho in the second round of the Presidential election. The number of votes cast for Halonen was 1,644,532, which is 51.6 per cent of all votes cast. Esko Aho, the runner-up, got 1,540,803 votes, i.e. 48.4 per cent of the votes cast. The starting position was even between the candidates after the first round and continued very tight during the second round. The number of votes cast for Halonen was 3.2 percentage points higher than for Aho. In numbers the difference was a total of 103,729 votes.

Halonen was especially successful in the constituencies and large towns of southern Finland. She got the best results in the constituencies of Helsinki, at 66.3 per cent, and of Uusimaa, at 59.3 per cent of the votes cast. Aho had as many as eight strong constituencies where the number of votes cast for him was higher than for Halonen. He got the highest number of votes from the constituencies of Vaasa (70%) and Åland (60.6%).

About 780,000 votes remained to be divided as a "legacy" of the first round. The candidates shared these free votes fairly equally. Compared to the first round of the election, the number of votes cast for Aho increased by 489,644 (by 14 percentage points) and for Halonen by 420,101 (by 11.6 percentage points). Both got more or less equal numbers of the votes cast for the Coalition Party, Aho slightly more than Halonen. Halonen inherited most of the votes cast for the Green League's Heidi Hautala, while Aho received the majority of Rehn's votes.

Voting turnout up in the second round

The voting turnout of Finnish citizens resident in Finland was 80.2 per cent. It was 3.3 percentage points higher than in the first round three weeks ago. Compared to the second round of the 1994 Presidential election, the voting turnout now remained 2.1 percentage points lower than six years ago.

The direct popular election makes people more active at the ballot than other elections. In the second round as many as 3.2 million Finns used their right to vote, but almost one million eligible voters (966,000) did not vote in the second round, either.

The voting turnout was highest in the constituency of Vaasa, at 83.4 per cent. The voting turnout was also over 80 per cent in the constituencies of Oulu and Lapland (81.1%), Uusimaa (80.9%), Pirkanmaa (80.7%), Central Finland (80.2%) and Satakunta (80.3%). Finnish citizens resident abroad also voted slightly more actively than in the first round. The voting turnout for them was 10,9 per cent (10.5 in the first round).

In all Statistics Finland's statistical tables by municipality and constituency the voting turnout is calculated from votes cast by Finnish citizens resident in Finland.